Saturday, July 26, 2014

Texas Abortion Rate Plunges, Liberals Fume

According to a study by abortion advocates, in just six months following the enactment of a pro-life Texas law, the rate of abortions in the state dropped 13%, including a 70% reduction in medication abortions, translating to saving the lives of 9,200 babies, and suggesting that closing abortion clinics results in fewer abortions.

“Given the number of closures, and the size of the population left without a nearby provider, it is surprising that the overall decline in the abortion rate was not greater than the 13% change we observed,”-- Texas Policy Evaluation Project

Despite Wendy Davis’s famous filibuster of the legislature’s omnibus abortion law, and with the Supreme Court declining to block the law from going into effect, the state implemented several sweeping restrictions on abortion that had never before been in effect all at once. Those restrictions effectively closed nearly half of the state’s clinics, made it much harder to get an abortion by taking two pills (known as medication abortion), and banned abortion after 20 weeks, several weeks before the Supreme Court deemed constitutional.

For the first time, researchers have released data on what the immediate impact of those laws has been. In the first six months of the law going into effect, there was a 13% decrease in the abortion rate in Texas compared to the year before, according to a study to be published in the journal Contraception by public health researchers affiliated with the Texas Policy Evaluation Project.

There was what the researchers termed a “small but significant” increase in the number of abortions conducted after twelve weeks gestation, from 13.5% of all abortions performed in Texas to 13.9% of all abortions.

The study looked specifically at the effects of HB 2, a law that was passed in the summer of 2013 and partially went into effect in November. . . .

Many clinics have already had to shut their doors because their doctors could not get admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Hospitals often turn down abortion providers for political or logistical reasons having nothing to do with the provider's competence or safety record. When the final portion of HB 2 takes effect in September, all but six of the state's remaining clinics are expected to close.

The study finds that as a result of reduced access to abortion, there were 9,200 fewer legal abortions in Texas over the past year than in the previous year. . . .

Dr. Daniel Grossman, an abortion advocate, is the lead author of the [Texas Policy Evaluation Project] study and vice president for Research at Ibis Reproductive Health.

Grossman told The Christian Post, however, that the researchers "cannot definitively say what caused the decline" in the number of abortions in Texas.

One explaination for the decline, he said, "might be that the [Texas] law passed in 2011 that requires women to see their ultrasound before an abortion is making women change their minds. [But] our research, and that of others, indicates that is not the case."

"In addition, we would have expected to see this sharper decline in 2012, which was not the case," Grossman added.

“When abortion clinics close, lives are saved as women find other ways to deal with the challenges they face rather than taking the lives of their babies,” said [President of Operation Rescue, Troy] Newman. “We expect to see abortion numbers continue to steeply decline in Texas as more abortion facilities shut down, and that is great news.”

“The new study proves that the new law is effectively protecting the lives of women and their babies, and will extend those protections to even more women as the rest of the law goes into effect later this year. There should be no hesitancy for other states to adopt similar measures to protect the public and reduce the number of abortions in their states,” said Newman. “Success is measured in results, and the fact that HB2 will shut down 85% of shoddy abortion mills and save nearly 10,000 lives per year in Texas shows that legislation is incredibly successful and should be emulated nationwide.”